Chapter XLIV

Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not Hear a
foot-fall!--TEMPEST.

There's but a shirt and a half in all my company, and the
half shirt is two napkins pinned together and thrown over the
shoulders.--KING HENRY IV.

Our emaciated condition, hard labor, and the bracing mountain air, conspired to make us ravenous. In quantity, the pork and corn-bread which we devoured was almost miraculous; in quality, it seemed like the nectar and ambrosia of the immortal gods. It was far better adapted to our necessities than the daintiest luxuries of civilization. In California, Australia, and Colorado goldmines, on the New Orleans _levée_, and wherever else the most trying physical labor is to be performed, pork and corn-bread have been found the best articles of food.

The Loyalists were all ready to feed, shelter, and direct us, but reluctant to accompany us far from their homes. They would say:

"You need no guides; the road is so plain, that you cannot possibly miss it."

But midnight journeys among the narrow lanes and obscure mountain-paths had taught us that we could miss any road whatever which was not inclosed upon both sides by fences too high for climbing. Therefore, we insisted upon pilots.

[Sidenote: MONEY CONCEALED IN CLOTHING.]

Fortunately, I had left Salisbury with a one-hundred-dollar United States note concealed under the hem of each leg of my pantaloons, just above the instep, and two more sewn in the lining of my coat. I had in my portmonnaie fifty dollars in Northern bank-notes, five dollars in gold, and a hundred dollars in Confederate currency. Davis brought away about the same amount. We should have left it with our fellow-prisoners, but for the probability of being recaptured and confined, where money would serve us in our extremest need. Now it enabled us to remunerate amply both our white and black friends. Sometimes the mountaineers would say:

"We do not do these things for money. We have fed and assisted hundreds of refugees and escaping prisoners, but never received a cent for it."

Those whom they befriended were usually penniless. We appreciated their kindness none the less because fortunate enough to be able to recompense them. They were unable to resist the argument that, when our forces came, they would need "green-backs" to purchase coffee.

[Sidenote: IMMINENT PERIL OF UNION CITIZENS.]

Every man who gave us a meal, sheltered us in his house or barn, pointed out a refuge in the woods, or directed us one mile upon our journey, did it at the certainty, if discovered, of being imprisoned, or forced into the Rebel army, whether sick or well, and at the risk of having his house burned over his head. In many cases, discovery would have resulted in his death by shooting, or hanging in sight of his own door.

During our whole journey we entered only one house inhabited by white Unionists, which had never been plundered by Home Guards or Rebel guerrillas. Almost every loyal family had given to the Cause some of its nearest and dearest. We were told so frequently--"My father was killed in those woods;" or, "The guerrillas shot my brother in that ravine," that, finally, these tragedies made little impression upon us. The mountaineers never seemed conscious that they were doing any heroic or self-sacrificing thing. Their very sufferings had greatly intensified their love for the Union, and their faith in its ultimate triumph.

Drowsily wondering at our capacity for sleep, we dozed through the first day of the New Year, and the fifteenth of our liberty. After dark we spent two hours in the house before the log fire. The good woman had one son already escaped to the North--a fresh link which bound her mother-heart to that ideal paradise. She fed us, mended our clothing, and parted from us with the heartiest "God bless you!"

Her youngest born, a lad of eleven years, accompanied us five miles to the house of a Unionist, who received us without leaving his bed. He gave us such minute information about the faint, obscure road that we found little difficulty in keeping it.

[Sidenote: FORDING CREEKS AT MIDNIGHT.]

Through the biting air we pressed rapidly up the narrow valley of a clear, tumbling mountain stream, whose frowning banks, several hundred feet in hight, were covered with pines and hemlocks. In twelve miles the road crossed the creek twenty-nine times. Instead of bridges were fords for horsemen and wagons, and foot-logs for pedestrians. Cold and stiff, we discovered that crossing the smooth, icy logs in the darkness was a hazardous feat. Wolfe was particularly lame, and slipped several times into the icy torrent, but managed to flounder out without much delay. He endured with great serenity all our suggestions, that even though water was his native element, he had a very eccentric taste to prefer swimming to walking, in that state of the atmosphere.

At one crossing the log was swept away. We wandered up and down the stream, which was about a hundred feet wide, but could find not even the hair which Mahomet discovered to be the bridge over the bottomless pit. But as canoes are older than ships, so legs are more primitive than bridges. We e'en plunged in, waist deep, and waded through, among the cakes of floating ice.

[Sidenote: "LOOPED AND WINDOWED RAGGEDNESS."]

Our wardrobes were suffering quite as much as our persons. We did not carry looking-glasses, so I am not able to speak of myself; but my colleague was a subject for a painter. Any one seeing him must have been convinced that he was made up for the occasion; that his looped and windowed raggedness never could have resulted from any natural combination of circumstances. The fates seemed to decree that as "Junius" went naked into the Confederacy (leaving most of his wardrobe on deposit at the bottom of the Mississippi), he should come out of it in the same condition.

Overcoat he had none. Pantaloons had been torn to shreds and tatters by the brambles and thorn-bushes. He had a hat which was not all a hat. It was given to him, after he had lost his own in a Rebel barn, by a warm-hearted African, as a small tribute from the Intelligent Contraband to his old friend the Reliable Gentleman--by an African who felt with the most touching propriety that it would be a shame for any correspondent of _The Tribune_ to go bareheaded as long as a single negro in America was the owner of a hat! It was a white wool relic of the old-red-sandstone period, with a sugar-loaf crown, and a broad brim drawn down closely over his ears, like the bonnet of an Esquimaux.

His boots were a stupendous refutation of the report that leather was scarce among the Rebels. I understood it to be no figure of rhetoric, but the result of actual and exact measurement, which induced him to call them the "Seven-Leaguers." The small portion of his body, which was visible between the tops of his boots and the bottom of his hat, was robed in an old gray quilt of Secession proclivities; and taken for all in all, with his pale, nervous face and his remarkable costume, he looked like a cross between the Genius of Intellectuality and a Rebel bushwhacker!

Before daylight, we shiveringly tapped on the door of a house at the foot of the Blue Ridge.

"Come in," was the welcome response.

Entering, we found a woman sitting by the log fire. Beginning to introduce ourselves, she interrupted:

"O, I know all about you. You are Yankee prisoners. Your friends who passed last evening told us you were coming, and I have been sitting up all night for you. Come to the fire and dry your clothes."

[Sidenote: STORIES ABOUT THE WAR.]

For two hours we listened to her tales of the war. The history of almost every Union family was full of romance. Each unstoried mountain stream had its incidents of daring, of sagacity, and of faithfulness; and almost every green hill had been bathed in that scarlet dew from which ever springs the richest and the ripest fruit.

Concealment here was difficult; so we were taken to the house of a neighbor, who also was waiting to welcome us. He took us to his storehouse, right by the road-side.

"The Guard," said he, "searched this building last Thursday, unsuccessfully, and are hardly likely to try it again just yet."

Soon, lying near a fire upon a warm feather-bed, we wooed the drowsy god with all the success which the hungry Salisbury vermin, sticking closer than brothers, would permit.

XVI. _Monday, January 2._

[Sidenote: CLIMBING THE BLUE RIDGE.]

Before night the guide returned from conducting Boothby's party, and assured us that the coast was clear. After dark, invigorated by tea and apple brandy, we followed our pilot by devious paths up the steep, fir-clad, piny slope of the Blue Ridge.

The view from the summit is beautiful and impressive; but for our weariness and anxiety, we should have enjoyed it very keenly.

A few weeks before, the Unionist now leading us had sent his little daughter of twelve years, alone, by night, fifteen miles over the mountains, to warn some escaping Union prisoners that the Guard had gained a clue to their whereabouts. They received the warning in season to find a place of safety before their pursuers came.

We were now on the west side of the Ridge. A heavy rain began to fall, and, though soaked and weary, we were glad to have our tracks obliterated, and thus be insured against pursuit.

"The labor we delight in physics pain;"

but in this case the effort was so arduous that the panacea was not very effective. Thomas Starr King tells the story of a little man, who, being asked his weight, replied:

"Ordinarily, a hundred and twenty pounds; but when I'm mad, I weigh a ton!"

I think any one of our wet, blistered feet, which, at every step, sunk deep into the slush, would have counterbalanced his whole body! Like millstones we dragged them up hill after hill, and through the long valleys which stretched drearily between. Though not hungering after the flesh-pots of Egypt, we still thought, half regretfully, of our squalid Salisbury quarters, where we had at least a roof to shelter us, and a bunk of straw. But we needed no injunction to remember Lot's wife; for a pillar of salt would have represented a fabulous sum of money in the currency of the Rebels; and we had no desire to swell their scanty revenues or supply their impoverished commissary department.

[Sidenote: CROSSING THE NEW RIVER AT MIDNIGHT.]

At midnight we reached New River, two hundred and fifty yards wide. Our guide took us over, one at a time, behind him upon his horse. We were probably five hundred miles above the point where this river, as the Great Kanawha, unites with the Ohio; but it was the first stream we had found running northward, and its soft, rippling song of home and freedom was very sweet to our ears. Already our Promised Land stretched before us, and the shining river seemed a pathway of light to its hither boundary. Better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, this was the Jordan, flowing toward all we loved and longed for. It revived the great world of work and of life which had faded almost to fable.

At two in the morning we reached the house of a stanch Unionist, which nestled romantically in the green valley, inclosed on all sides by dark mountains.

[Sidenote: HOSPITALITY AND ORATORY COMBINED.]

Our new friend, herculean in frame and with a heavy-tragedy voice, came out where we sat, dripping and dreary, under an old cotton-gin, and addressed us in a pompous strain, worthy of Sergeant Buzfuz:

"Gentlemen," said he, "there are, unfortunately, at my house to-night two wayfarers, who are Rebels and traitors. If they knew of your presence, it would be my inevitable and eternal ruin. Therefore, unable to extend to you such hospitalities as I could wish, I bid you welcome to all which _can_ be furnished by so poor a man as I. I will place you in my barn, which is warm, and filled with fodder. I will bring you food and apple brandy. In the morning, when these infernal scoundrels are gone, I will entertain you under my family roof. Gentlemen, I have been a Union man from the beginning, and I shall be a Union man to the end. I had three sons; one died in a Rebel hospital; one was killed at the battle of the Wilderness, fighting (against his will) for the Southern cause; the third, thank God! is in the Union lines."

Here the father overcame the orator; and, with the conjunction of apple brandy, corn bread, and quilts, we were soon asleep in the barn.